Anzac Day to a special drumbeat

Mick Thomas' father went into Hiroshima a fortnight after the August 6, 1945, atomic bomb blast killed an estimated 80,000 and razed much of the city.

"It was big stuff for a young bloke," the Melbourne singer-songwriter says of his late father, who served in the navy in Japan in World War II.

He remembers his comment late in life on a documentary on the attack by the Americans, who dropped another on Nagasaki three days later. "He said … they reckon it didn't have to happen, you know."

The musician says his father "had a sadness, and I guess some of it came from the war".

Though his father had kept in touch with some with whom he had served, he never marched on Anzac Day and was "in a gentle way kind of anti-jingoistic". The former Weddings Parties Anything frontman hesitated before accepting an invitation to perform during Anzac Day celebrations this month at the Caulfield RSL. In part, he feared it might revive inappropriate expectations among some fans.

''My worry with a gig like this is that it perhaps does feed into that whole idea of an Aussie pride that some people I reckon mistakenly put on the Weddings' back that we really tried to avoid,'' he says.

"They kind of equated the fact that we would turn around and sing in an Australian accent about Australian places and things with this sense of Aussie pride.

"It has nothing to do with this sense of national pride. It has to do with an artistic recognition of where you live and what inspires you to write.''

Thomas' maternal grandfather lost a leg in battle at Ypres in World War I. He disapproves of the way in which the Anzac spirit is invoked, in particular when describing the achievements of footballers in the annual Anzac Day match between Essendon and Collingwood.

''These guys are on a f---ing football field,'' he says over coffee near his home in Melbourne's inner north. ''They tell us this was because of the Anzac spirit. I'm sorry, but it really troubles the hell out of me.'' He finally agreed after discussions with Caulfield RSL club. ''We believe Mick's music was very much suited to such an important day to the RSL," says Caulfield RSL general manager, Peter Frost, citing two of his songs - Scorn of the Women, the title track on the Weddings' late 1980s debut album and a recent song, Gallipoli Rosemary, recorded on Anzac Day.

Thomas wrote Scorn about a man accused of cowardice even though he had been found medically unfit for service. He says it was inspired in part by an elderly man he had befriended early in his career.

''He was a blind guy who couldn't go and fight," he says of the song that was influenced by Eric Bogle's The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

He wrote Gallipoli Rosemary after a friend gave him a rosemary bush he planted in the Victorian goldfields town of Bealiba, where his grandfather enlisted.

Her great grandfather had brought the bush home from Gallipoli. Though his grandfather's name is recorded on a marble statue in town, he says the rosemary is in some ways ''a more significant connection to the past''.

Thomas will perform with a seven-piece, including two fiddles, a mandolin, a Dobro and accordion. He says one cannot ignore the legacy of war. ''It's there,'' he says. ''You've got to deal with it, and I think, without trying to sound egotistical or something, you can contribute to a broadening or [appreciation of] the complexities of it being understood.

"That's kind of where I'm coming from and that's what The Band Played Waltzing Matilda or The Green Fields of France (No Man's Land) or, hopefully, my few songs that deal with it directly, contribute to.''

Mick Thomas and the Roving Commission Wall of Folk Orchestra will perform in the Flying Saucer Room at Caulfield RSL from 3.30pm on Thursday, April 25.